Experiment

• I would plan an experiment in which I would try to see which aspect people link their identity to (I.e. religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity). These examples are based on some aspects I’ve seen people link identity too, but I know there are a lot more as well.
• My hypothesis would be that most people link their identity to ethnicity. Through conducting this experiment, I would be looking to see if my hypothesis holds true. The reason why this would me my hypothesis is because in my personal life people have always usually linked their identity to their ethnicity whether they were Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, etc.
• I will test my hypothesis through the following procedure.
  • I will approach random people of varying ages and ethnicity and ask them if it would be ok if I interviewed them.
  • I would proceed to interview them by first asking them about themselves, then asking them simply what they identify as, then asking them what factors in their life they feel may have impacted their answer.
  • I would keep a count of the number of people who link their identity with each factor based on a combination of both of their responses.
  • I would graph my findings so I could compare the size of the counts of each factor
  • Obviously, the factor that has the highest count is the factor that most people link their identity too
  • Either accept or reject hypothesis based on results.

I would expect most people to link their identity to their ethnicity. I would expect this because as I stated in my hypothesis, most people in my personal life identify this way. In addition to this I have gone through many identity strifes (I.e ethnic identity, sexual identity, religious identity), and yet I still link my identity to my ethnicity, but I broaden my definition of ethnicity. As a result of my life experiences and personal connections, I would expect most people to associate their identity most closely with their ethnicity.

I will not actually be carrying out this experiment. This experiment that I created actually seems really interesting, and I would love to carry it out. However, I just don’t have time to conduct it because I am currently taking courses as well as working on my own research project in the field of Statistics.

If I were to actually conduct my experiment, I would need a few things to carry it out. I would need time to go out and conduct my experiment as well as willing participants for my experiment. It wouldn’t cost any money to conduct this experiment. It would just require a lot of time and effort on my part.

This experiment would be very relevant to my project. This would be very relevant to my project because my project is centered around my identity, and this experiment would show me what most people link their identity too. This is important because I mostly associate my identity with my ethnicity, and so has most people in my personal life. As a result of this I start to think that most people think this way which impacts the way I view the subject of identity. This impacts the way I view identity because then I immediately start thinking about ethnicity when I think of identity. Having results to this experiment would help me confirm if I am correct in my thought process, and the results would shed some light to me as to what people as a whole really associate their identity with.

I got the idea to carry out this experiment from one of the autoethographies we read in class. In this autoethnography the author analyzed people’s relationships with reading through interviews with various people. I looked at this, and I immediately thought that this could be a good set up for an experiment I could conduct. The reason for this being that if you’re analyzing what most people link their identity to you really need to conduct interviews because it’s not a concrete thing, and you need to extrapolate the answer to the question based on their personal responses to the questions provided. I then got the idea to tally the results, and graph them from my personal experience. I’m currently conducting research in statistics, and whenever I’m analyzing something I always graph the results of my data analysis so that I can clearly see my results. This allows you to be efficient and accurate when interpreting your results.

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